Steampunk (photo by vonslatt)

The ideas behind the steampunk sci-fi subgenre have been around since Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but it was given its moniker in the late '80s as a speculative-fiction genre, alongside cyberpunk, ribofunk and splatterpunk. While the others peer 15 minutes into the future, steampunk envisions a future that has collapsed onto a re-imagined Victorian past. Steam and clockworks replace silicon logic, brass and copper stand in for titanium and plastic, and airships replace spaceships.